Crime, Media, Culture http://cmc.sagepub.

com/

How to explain a suicide

Mark Drakeford Crime Media Culture 2006 2: 217 DOI: 10.1177/1741659006065424 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/2/2/217

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Crime, Media, Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://cmc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/2/2/217.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Aug 9, 2006 What is This?

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

POLEMIC

How to explain a suicide

MARK DRAKEFORD, University of Cardiff, UK Abstract
This polemic explores a newspaper article about youth justice. It suggests that a dominant discourse holds a powerful hegemony over large parts of the British media through which young people generally, and those in trouble with the law, in particular, are demonized. When events take place which threaten to disrupt that discourse, strenuous journalistic efforts have to be made to counteract that disruption and to reafrm established understandings, however awed those understandings might be. This article anatomizes that process in operation and in relation to a particular event the suicide, in 2004, of Adam Rickwood, the youngest child ever to take his own life while in the care and custody of the modern British penal system.

Key words
crime; scandal; suicide; youth

INTRODUCTION
The language of young offenders has long transplanted the discourse of children in trouble which, in England and Wales, had achieved a very temporary ascendancy in the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act. In British culture, generally, youths occupy a highly ambivalent position (Haines and Drakeford, 1999), both feared and envied and recurrently portrayed as providing evidence of moral, physical and social decline (see Pearson (1983) for a denitive account of these accusations over many generations). Offenders provide especially fruitful material in this regard, because they can be made to symbolize the themes of decline, decay and dangerousness without ambivalence. This brief piece considers one example of what happens when that simple certainty is challenged. The bidding war between political parties to establish ascendancy in the tough on crime stakes has resulted in a rapid recourse to ever more punitive responses. The Howard Leagues regular bulletins, recording the shameful facts 1659 incidents of self-injury or attempted suicide by juveniles in prisons recorded between 1998 and 2002; 12 suicides

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 2(2): 217223 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659006065424]

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

218

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

by young people aged 15 to 17 in prisons since 1997 go almost unnoticed. The Reports of the Chief Inspector of HM Prisons (1999, 2001) condemning institutions as unsafe and disgraceful are met with ritualistic responses from the Home Ofce, claiming that the problems uncovered have already been addressed and put right. A cultural hegemony, reinforced by media reporting, links youth and crime in the public mind in a way which dissolves these categories into one, regarding those caught up in the criminal justice system as simply reaping the rewards of their own culpability. And then, an occasional event takes place which disrupts and challenges the conventional clichs around which media accounts are framed and forwarded to readers. On 9 August 2004, 14-year-old Adam Rickwood became the youngest person ever to take his own life while held in a British custodial establishment. A child who had previously only experienced minor scrapes (Goldson and Coles, 2005: 65) with the law, he had been held at the privately managed Hassockeld Secure Training Centre in County Durham for breaching bail conditions in relation to a more serious charge of wounding. He died early on the day on which he was due to appear in Court again to make a further bail application. The UK mass media, which had largely ignored the suicide of 24 other children and young people in custody since 1990, did, initially, appear to mobilize around the Rickwood case, from the heavyweights of the Independent and the Observer Another Death, Another Disgrace: Young Offenders Are Treated Barbarically (15 August 2004) to the Sun and the Sunday Mirror How the Hell Was My Boy Allowed to Hang Himself? (15 August 2004). Such specic concerns, however, sat uneasily among those newspapers which had taken a very different attitude towards youth and crime in general. During the 1980s, and particularly under the editorship of Sir David English, the Daily Mail established itself, in its own words, as the true voice of Middle England (Daily Mail, 1998). The silent masses were, it said, yearning for a voice which would articulate for them the aspirational family values with which English imbued this newspaper as a core belief (Daily Mail, 1998). It was nearly seven years later before other newspapers were able to disclose an example of just how core such values had become, when recording Sir Davids 1992 farewell party as editor of the Daily Mail, at which he and all his editorial staff dressed like Hitler and members of the Third Reich. A memorable appearance of the newspapers drama critic Jack Tinker as Goebbels brought the house down (Daily Express, 2005). A fusion of these two strands aspirational family values and a fondness for strong leadership has long been characteristic of the Daily Mails general approach to the issues of youth crime. A regular reader of the newspaper would be left in no doubt that Britain is being overun by feral teenagers . . . running wild (Daily Mail, 2005a). In Britains inner cities, the law of the land has been replaced by the law of the jungle (Daily Mail, 2005b). The cold, chilling facts of youth crime were an indictment of the education system, the failure of the courts to deter, and the breakdown of the traditional two-parent family (Daily Mail, 2005b). This breakdown which the Daily Mail has traced over many decades is a sort of Apocalypse Forever cocktail of Broken homes. Feckless mothers. Absent fathers. Sink estates. Drink and worse (Daily Mail, 2005b). In the Mails world the Courts respond only with a slap on the wrist (Daily Mail, 2005b), the government is devoted to gimmicks to keep people out of jail (Daily Mail, 2005c) and local

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

DRAKEFORD HOW TO EXPLAIN A SUICIDE

219

authorities spend council tax money on giving young thugs adventure activities and even lavish foreign holidays (Daily Mail, 2005d). How much better, readers would learn, they do these things in Arizona where, the Mail reported wistfully, felons were shown no mercy and chain gang convicts were humiliated by being forced to parade in pink underwear (Daily Mail, 2005e). Against this background, it comes as something of a surprise to nd that the longest newspaper article, by some distance, published in the immediate aftermath of Adam Rickwoods death appeared not in the broadsheets but in the Daily Mail of 16 August 2004. In over 2100 words, the newspaper investigated the circumstances of a death which was then less than a week old. The story begins sympathetically enough. It describes Adams last visit from his family and sets out some basic public policy issues, asking if a privately run child jail is the appropriate environment for vulnerable youngsters on remand? It offers an account of events said to have taken place immediately before Adams suicide: his phone call to his solicitor complaining of bullying and an assault by a member of Hassock staff; the subsequent phone call from Adams mother in which she was told that he had been restrained by means of a tweak to the nose, and was now ne and did not want to speak to her. So far, so very unlike the Daily Mail. Then, about a quarter of the way through its length, the article changes gear to take on a very different tone and purpose. More than ten years ago, Bagguley and Mann (1992) pinned down the underlying discourse which the then government Ministers deployed in describing the problems of the unemployed underclass that of lying, thieving, bastards. In a single brief paragraph, which deserves to be quoted in full, the Daily Mail article pivots from apparent sympathy, to a much more familiar litany: The truth is that while one would not wish to compound the grief of his close relatives, Adams story is a bleak tale of family breakdown, and an absence of discipline, as well as a blas acceptance of drug-taking, underage drinking and petty theft. The truth, as readers of this Journal will know, is a good deal more contestable than mass media outlets suggest. The article under consideration here sets about constructing a particular version of the truth based, in this case, on a detailed character assassination of the Rickwood family sourced, in one of Fleet Streets nest traditions, through interviews carried out with them. Six different strands can be discerned in its account, tting each piece together in a jigsaw which reveals a very particular view of the relationship between crime and culture. A brief examination of each strand now follows.

BAD FROM THE START

The Mails account begins by returning to the circumstances of Adams birth he was the result of a brief ing between his mother and a man he never met. Nor was he the rst child to be produced in this way. His mother then just 22 already had two daughters, from a previous live-in relationship. Here, then, the Daily Mail-endorsed

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

220

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

sanctities of marriage and the family were outed from the start. Adam may have come to a bad end, but things had been bad from the start.

LIKE ATTRACTS LIKE

If Adams start in life was suspect, then the problems which he faced were to get worse. When he was just a few months old, his mother set up home with close neighbour, lorry driver John Pounder. A hint of prurient sex he was ten years older than Carol and a side-swipe at the rundown council estate where she lived was followed by the revelation that he, too, had shown scant regard for convention, leaving an existing marriage with a daughter to be looked after by her mother, and a son left to be brought up by grandparents. Media stories draw powerfully on archetypes which resonate with easily accessible and symbolic power. None fall more easily into this category than stepparents, as the Daily Mail article clearly recognizes. John Pounder may have been the only father Adam has known, but his young life was no fairy-tale. Hardly surprising, then, that as a toddler he set himself on re with a lighter he had been playing with and sustained burns to his upper body and arms.

THEY DONT MAKE THEM LIKE THAT ANYMORE

Moving on from the stark deciencies of Adams earliest childhood, the article now turns to wider family members and patterns, drawing heavily on an interview with his maternal grandmother, Margaret Rickwood, a matriarchal gure, now in her 60s. Two distinctly different themes are drawn from the material which this interview provides. The rst suggests the loss of old solidities and verities, embodied in that older generation of Grandad Pounder, and Nana Pounder who Adam helped to look after in her wheelchair, and especially grandfather Davey Rickwood, a former Scottish coal miner who was Adams world. This was a generation brought up in conditions which the article quotes approvingly. Getting belted at school never did me any harm, Grandpa Rickwood told the Daily Mails reporter, adding wistfully, they dont do that now. The sense of decay and deterioration which is such a powerful and long-term component in the British media depiction of young people is palpable.

A BARREL LOAD OF BAD APPLES

Having taken a backward glance to Britains better days, the article now has to manage a difcult transition, in explaining how the benets of a 1950s education had failed so dramatically to transmit its happy values to succeeding generations. It does so by adding an intensied vitriol to its account of present-day circumstances. By now, the reader is hardly surprised to learn that both an uncle and an aunt had served terms of

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

DRAKEFORD HOW TO EXPLAIN A SUICIDE

221

imprisonment, each for offences involving drugs. Nor, in this sprawling family saga, is the reader spared the gratuitous piece of local colour that the man who had rst shared Mrs Pounders bed, fathering her rst two children, was now partnered with her own older sister. Sex is an essential ingredient of a tabloid story, and, despite the highly tenuous connection offered by the death of a child in custody it is never far below the surface here casual and insistent, feckless and fecund: if Adam was not better than he ought to be, then he was no single rotten apple in an otherwise happy family. The whole barrel was fermenting.

ITS IN THE GENES

If the generation older than Adam thus tted every stereotype in the Daily Mail councilestate handbook, then the problems so recorded ourished again in his own. Almost all of the young family members who visited their grandmother in the wake of Adams death appear to smoke and drink heavily, we are told. Few seem to have jobs. Not a single one of Margaret Rickwoods grandchildren was married, although, with a fascination for breeding which would have enthused Sir Keith Joseph, we learn that they had already produced eight great-grandchildren, with another this time to Adams eldest sister, 16year-old Sharon on the way. In this unhappy scene, it turns out that Adam was not even the rst of his generation to die in childhood. In full-on Lady Bracknell style, we learn that he is Margaret Rickwoods fourth grandchild tragically to suffer in this way. As the writer points out, relying on a rare understatement, against this background, it is easy to see why Adam was heading for trouble.

THE STATES TO BLAME

If Adams family had been a lamentable failure, it still managed to come a substantial second in the Daily Mails pantheon of pathology. If they had let him down, this was nothing compared to the failures of the liberal establishment, in the shape of the school and the even more promising hate gure, the social worker. The school, instead of helping him by imposing discipline and bringing him under control expelled him, an action of which the Daily Mail might otherwise have heartily approved. The sins of social workers were even harder to create. They found him a new school, the article says accusingly, and, using the councils money, paid for a taxi to take him there. They refused to answer the Daily Mail reporters questions, of course, but had certainly failed to act in relation to the emotional problems which may (or may not) have been diagnosed in Adams case. Faced with a family where anything goes, where smoking, drinking and drug taking were not so much fatalistically accepted as actively condoned, and by a state system which had neglected or pandered to his difculties, the reader is led to conclude that it was little wonder that he found the going hard in a secure training centre, where he was not allowed to smoke and where his music centre had been removed.

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

222

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

At the end of 2000 words, the disturbing possibility with which the article had started that Adams death might pose serious questions about youth justice policy and the practice of incarceration had been comfortably erased. In a hard-line hatchet job, deploying every rhetorical device of the hard-faced right, responsibility for what happened to Adam Rickwood, a 14-year-old, 5 2 child who took his own life, has been lifted from the shoulders of the reader. There are many serious questions to be asked about a system in which deaths in custody have proliferated and been driven ever further down the age range. None of these questions is raised in the Daily Mails article. A shared sense of cultural certainty closes over the gap that an individual death threatened to open in attitudes towards child jails. The story of Adam Rickwood has straggled on in media reporting, as claims makers on his behalf his mother, the Howard League, his MP struggle to make an impact. More than a year later, none of the promised inquiries into his death has reported. The Home Ofce has repeated its routine refusal to countenance any form of independent inquiry. And, since August 2004, the Daily Mail has carried not a single word on the subject. Almost exactly a year to the day, however, after its original article, the Daily Mail (2005f) returned to the subject of youth justice and child jails. Headlined, 30,000 Party for Young Rapists and Murderers, it could barely conceal its glee at a story which appeared so unambiguously to reinforce the attitudes which the newspaper so assiduously fostered. Another North of England Young Offender Institution had treated its inmates 455 tearaways aged 15 to 20, including serious and violent criminals to a week of summer fun, comprising live rock bands, a disco with DJs, a dance troupe, falconry displays, a bouncy castle and plays by a visiting theatre company. The weeklong party had infuriated staff who accused the governor of bending over backwards to accede to prisoners demands. The Daily Mails informer said he was sickened by the treats laid on for the young criminals, when law-abiding families are struggling to pay for similar entertainments for their children in the school holidays. It was, said David Davies for the Conservative Party, an insult to the criminal justice system and to those victims left scarred by their crimes. If it ever had been disrupted, all was back in place again, in the Daily Mail view of the world.

CONCLUSION
In a general survey of public policy disasters in Western Europe, Bovens et al. (1998) draw out the extent to which the public impact of such disasters rests upon techniques of revelation and interpretation, in which the mass media provide a pivotal forum for political sense-making and mass mobilisation (p. 39). They conclude that, in the broader sweep of public issues reporting, the western media have moved from the lapdogs of the pre-Watergate period, through a watchdog period in the aftermath of that event, to the junkyard dogs of the contemporary era aggressively seeking any form of political dirt available, and not hesitating to put up a vicious ght to get it (p. 49).

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011

DRAKEFORD HOW TO EXPLAIN A SUICIDE

223

Bovens and his colleagues were writing about the media treatment of politicians and the world of politics. What this brief article suggests is that junkyarding is not simply conned to the lives and actions of the powerful and inuential. It is deployed as a deliberate technique, to be applied to the lives of ordinary people when their histories threaten to raise awkward questions about those settled constructions through which newspapers convey their particular view of the world. In an era of penal barbarism, young people who get tangled up with the law are routinely portrayed as either let off lightly or, at most, getting what they deserve. Nothing, not even the suicide of a child, it seems, is incapable of being brought within that deeply awed and blinkered framework.

References
Bovens, M., P. t Hart, S. Dekker, G. Verheuvel and E. de Vries (1998) The Mass Media and Policy Disasters, in P. Gray and P. t Hart (eds) Public Policy Disasters in Western Europe, pp. 3958. London: Routledge. Bagguley, P. and K. Mann (1992) Idle Thieving Bastards? Scholarly Representations of the Underclass, Work, Employment & Society 6: 11326. Chief Inspector of HM Prisons (1999) Report of a Full Announced Inspection of HM Young Offender Institution Portland. London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons. Chief Inspector of HM Prisons (2001) Report of a Full Announced Inspection of HM Young Offender Institution Feltham. London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons. Daily Express (2005) Daily Mail Forced to Admit Nazi Stunt at Editors Party, 22 February. Daily Mail (1998) The Making of a Newspaper Legend, 11 June. Daily Mail (2004) This Week 14 Year Old Adam Became the Youngest Person to Kill Himself in Custody, 16 August. Daily Mail (2005a) Killed for His Bike, 8 July. Daily Mail (2005b) The Feral Females, 4 July. Daily Mail (2005c) ASBOs, Lout Britains New Badge of Honour, 30 June. Daily Mail (2005d) Make Yobs Dress Like a Chain Gang Demands Minister, 16 May. Daily Mail (2005e) Champion of the Chain Gang, 21 May. Daily Mail (2005f) 30,000 Party for Young Rapists and Murderers, 20 August. Goldson, B. and D. Coles (2005) In the Care of the State? Child Deaths in Penal Custody in England and Wales. London: Inquest. Haines, K. and M. Drakeford (1999) Young People and Youth Justice. London: Macmillan. Observer (2004) Another Death, Another Disgrace: Young Offenders are Treated Barbarically, 15 August. Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan. Sunday Mirror (2004) How the Hell Was My Boy Allowed to Hang Himself?, 15 August.

MARK DRAKEFORD, Professor, University of Cardiff and the Cabinets Health and Social Policy Advisor, Welsh Assembly Government. Email: drakeford@cardiff.ac.uk.

Downloaded from cmc.sagepub.com by RAVI BABU BUNGA on October 29, 2011